Details: The 2012 Annual Hart House Hancock Lecture features innovative thinkers, chosen by students, who create public discourse on current issues. This year’s lecture was given by Julia Belluz, Associate Editor at the Medical Post and a National Magazine Award-winning journalist covering health care, policy and medical politics. The lecture explored how social pressure influences our personal health choices, sometimes for the worst. Moving beyond individual choices, the lecture explored how and why certain types of evidence impact how health policies are made and examined how we can bridge the research to action gap so that we better engage with evidence as a society for more sound personal health and policy decisions.

“In the last few years, we’ve seen cases where something as trivial as a tweet literally extends a person’s life, gets them access to medical care they wouldn’t have had otherwise, and changes health policy.”
–Julia Belluz

Julia Belluz is a journalist focused on health care, policy and medical politics and works to improve discourse about health and science in the media. A journalism fellow with McMaster University, she has advised the World Health Organization on training health and science journalists from across the developing world about using research evidence to inform journalism and policy making. Ms. Belluz earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Ryerson University, where she won the Gordon Sinclair fellowship, and an M.Sc. in anthropology at the London School of Economics. She has worked at The Times, The Economist’s Intelligent Life and is currently the Associate Editor at the Medical Post. Her popular blog ‘Science-ish’ is a joint project with Maclean’s, the Medical Post and the McMaster Health Forum. Read more about Julia on her website: www.juliabelluz.com

Co-programming:

Evidence Party Workshop

Details: How to tell science from science-ish: tricks and tips for evaluating health-related statements by policymakers, opinion leaders, and the media. An intimate lunch and learn session with Julia Belluz and Prof Cameron Norman, Dalla Lana School of Public Health.